I have, in other words, regarded insensibility to the sacred as having causal priority over rebellion agaisnt the order of being. I wonder now if that is the correct ordering of things. Is it possible that man's atheism is instrumental -- that he denies God because he yearns to be free of the order of being, not vice-versa. It is the distinction, in other words, between spiritual autism as akin to literal autism (a simple pathological defect of understanding, will, and spirit) and as the intentional affectation of ignorance so as to rationalize the unfettering of one's will from basic rational and ethical considerations.

February 04, 2014

Remember that famous study according to which men who masturbate more frequent are less likely to develop prostate cancer, the one that has since been used as evidence that everyone everywhere simply must masturbate and if you disagree then you want people to get cancer? You know the one. (The idea, supposedly, is that routine masturbation flushes out the carcinogens that build up in the prostate without exposing the masturbator to the risks of STD transmission). I recently came across a study ("Sexual activity and prostate cancer risk in men diagnosed at a younger age," BJU International, 2009) which refines that finding -- specifically, finding that it only applies to men in their 50's. Masturbation exposes younger men to greater risk of prostate cancer. Who would've thought drowning your body in steroidal hormones would be bad for you?!

That got my gears turning in light of my recent pondering about statistics and the scientific enterprise, so I sought out a copy of that original study. I couldn't find one, but every newspaper report I found about it strongly suggests the original study was merely correlational. That stands to reason since it was probably intended to be exploratory, i.e., hypothesis-generating, the first in a longer line of research that, for whatever reason, seems not to have materialized.

Look at it this way. Suppose this study had not simply been compromised by type I error, measurement error, improper sampling, or any of the other problems that bedevil modern methodological research. Suppose, in other words, that men who masturbate really are at lower risk for prostate cancer later in life. Is the only possible interpretation available to understand this that nonmasturbation causes cancer? Is it completely impossible that anything else at all could relate these two things to one another? Isn't it possible that, say, the antecedents of prostate cancer inhibit sex drive? Problems with the prostate are, after all, associated with all kinds of sexual dysfunction, including anorgasmia and erectile dysfunction. Or that the kinds of healthy behaviors that reduce risk of prostate cancer (such as regular exercise) also boost sex drive (by improving cardiovascular health)?

So what we have is what is probably a perfectly reasonable statistical analysis which lends itself to a very, very narrow, exploratory interpretation -- within an arbitrary range of certainty probably inflated by the failure to meet methodological assumptions to violations of which those tests are not very robust. Which scientistic leftists (who, bear in mind, are so much smarter than you!) have, for whatever reason, misapprehended, falling for what ought to have been a very humiliating mistake warned against on the first or second day of every statistics 101 course.

Is the deception intentional, born of dishonesty in service to an evil agenda of utilitarianism and sexual subversion? Or is it born of ignorance, scientific illiteracy, and functional retardation from a group of people who insist (with the silent collusion of the researchers who never correct their errors) that science alone is the authoritative ground of all knowledge despite their inability to distinguish correlation from causation?

Maryland may soon be the first state in the country to launch a registry for animal abusers.

As early as next week, State Senator Ron Young plans to introduce a bill mandating that people convicted of animal abuse in Maryland submit their information to a registry, similar to the one for sex offenders. The program would collect the convicted abuser's photograph, fingerprints and address, and charge them $50 a year to fund the registry. If they aren’t convicted of another animal abuse crime for 10 years, they could request to be removed from the list. The registry would be available on a web page run by the Maryland Department of Public Safety.

“It can be posted for the protection of neighbors and their animals,” Young says. “And also, it can be used by pet stores and humane societies, to not allow these people to come and pick up another animal.” Maryland is ranked No. 15 in the nation for its animal protection laws, according to a new list released by the Humane Society of the United States.

Kinda' stupid, I think. We publicize sex offenders' names because it's of interest to people living nearby. Are we concerned cat hoarders are going to like, steal your cat or something? Why don't we publicize the names of actual thieves, robbers, perpetrators of violent assault, etc.?

But it got me thinking about animal rights. Our enemies obviously have no perspective on this (or any) issue, and it's easy to criticize and caricaturize them as sappy, sentimental morons. But that doesn't mean it isn't a worthy question what rights an animal can meaningfully be said to have. A right, such as it is, is the reflection of one's own duty, or the duty of another: thus children have the right to be cared for their parents, and parents have the right to care for their own children. Animals have no duties of their own (being nonvolitional) and thus no natural rights of their own, but it seems to me they do have rights in a very limited sense insofar as we have duties with respect to ourselves.

We have, after all, a duty to cultivate compassion in ourselves and to respect the beauty of creation. This implies a natural aversion to wantonly destroying or mistreating animal life. This isn't inconsistent with the utilitarian destruction of animal life, for instance, slaughtering a cow for meat or putting down diseased or deranged animals, but it certainly does imply a prohibition on the kind of arbitrary and irrational cruelty exhibited in those commercials with the sad, injured puppies and kittens with the Sarah McLaughlin song playing in the background. You know the one.

At any rate, all of this goes to show that senseless abuse of animals is a moral evil, but it does not suffice to show that the state ought, on principle, to involve itself in preventing it. The state is the defender of the moral integrity of the polity, so only those evils which include a scandalous element may licitly be subject to legal prohibition. For instance, we natural-law Catholics can agree that any use of the sexual faculty in a manner inconsistent with its end (that is, procreation, which necessitates marital, noncontraceptive, penetrative sex) is illicit. But some of these illicit acts, such as contraception or pornography, are scandalous, insofar as contraception must be manufactured, transported, sold, and consumed, where others are not. It follows, then, that contraception and pornography may licitly be prohibited where, say, masturbation may not.

So is animal abuse a sufficiently scandalous evil to justify the intrusion of the state? Generally, it probably is. Dog fights and cock fights seem a good example of this, being public acts which deaden the consciences of its participants. But even the lazy animal hoarder who makes no effort to conceal his abuse involves the public to some extent. Suppose I see a malnourished and injured dog on my neighbor's property limping about, whining in pain and scavenging vainly for food. The mere act of seeing it imposes on me the choice either to act compassionately or to harden my heart against it. Enforcing no legal strictures against animal abuse pretty much forces me to do the latter*.

In short, the protection of animals from gratuitous harm and cruelty ought to be regarded as a real moral issue, and in some cases a legal one; but except in its most gruesome forms, it is probably not a very serious issue in either sense of the word. Moreover, pets really are entitled to more protection than farm animals.

*Although I could imagine an arrangement in which the state neither intervenes to protect animals nor intervenes to protect lazy owners. For instance, in some states, a man who cares for abandoned property thereby acquires legal ownership of it. Likewise, I might be permitted to rescue my neighbor's abandoned dog and thereby acquire legal ownership of it, and the police would be forbidden to intervene on the derelict owner's behalf.

How is the "problem of evil" regarded as a problem at all? The claim that God is omnibenevolent is not evidential but metaphysical: He is good as a matter of necessity. Theodicy, properly understood, then, is simply an endeavor to reconcile the fact of evil with the necessity of God's omnibenevolence (a thing so necessary that even to say "God's omnibenevolence" is, strictly speaking, a redundancy). The problem of evil depends for its force on the claim that there is no possible reason why an all-good God would tolerate any evils. So it suffices to show that there is at least one possible reason why, even if we can't know for certain if it's true.

We may, for instance, suggest that the toleration of evil is instrumental: we may say God allows certain evils because they cultivate virtues such as self-sacrifice, courage, patience, or temperance, which would not exist in the absence of those evils. Or we can suggest that evil, being convertible with imperfection, is a necessary feature of any entity that is not God, who alone is perfect.

Or (and I think this is the proper response) we can simply point out that "all-good" does not mean "actualizing every possible good" any more than "all-creating" means "actualizing every possible being" (a fact pointed out by Just Thomism's James Chastek); it suffices to say that all the goods which exist are owed to God (just as all the beings which exist owe their existence to God).

See Alan Roebuck's "No Evidence for God?" in Intellectual Conservative for a useful treatment of the tendency of atheists to beg the question against theism by simply assuming, without basis, something like naturalism, materialism, or positivism to be true -- in other words, assuming the natural/material/empirically observable world is all there is.

* By "knowledge and facts" I mean factual, scientific proof. No personal opinions, appeals to revelation, quoting the bible, no arguments purely from quoting an authority without actual evidence, personal/second-hand stories that cannot be confirmed, and no "philosophical bullshit.” **

** By "philosophical bullshit" I am referring to the fact that philosophy is not the most reliable method of getting at the truth. The sciences and empiricism are the most reliable methods of getting at the truth, not simple thought experiments, or philosophizing.

Of course, whether or not science is the fullest description of reality is precisely what is at issue here; taking it off the table simply begs the question against theism. And the claim that science alone is the basis of all knowledge is at once a philosophical assertion and a nonscientific one (as all epistemological claims necessarily are) -- and thus is simply self-refuting. The only way to get around this irreconcilable contradiction is to indulge in what Voegelin called the prohibition of questioning, a better example of which I couldn't have asked for.

"Keep your morality out of politics" is an historically aberrant and deviant mode of thought, and for the simple reason that ethics and politics are not really distinct fields; rather they are distinct expressions of the same thing, fields of inquiry which lead, ultimately, to the same object.

In fact, pretty much all the fields of philosophical inquiry are now conducted as if they were quite distinct from each other, so that ethics is totally unrelated to politics which is totally unrelated to epistemology and so on. Hence Rawls sought a theory of justice which was "political, not metaphysical." What a strange thought; its historical inauthenticity is one datum for the falseness of the endeavor even to find (that is, invent) such a theory.

For premodern man, ontology was the glue which held the philosophical endeavor together. Just as surely as talk of truth, beauty, and virtue are simply discussions about the good under different aspects, so too are talk about right action, right knowledge, the good life, the best government, and so on simply different expressions of the question of what it means for something to be. How can you ask what the "best government" is until you know what "government" is? What "best" is? What "is" is? Ontology made an organic and harmonious unity out of a philosophical enterprise that is now not even so much specialized or modularized as it is simply fragmented. The abandonment of organized ontology has loosed on the world a flood of errors.

What we have today are shards of philosophy: a vast number of schools of thought about different fields, the necessary connections between which have been severed, which may be mixed and matched arbitrarily to produce a functionally infinite number of combinations, with no real reason to pick any one of them or even a method for doing so. Had a revolution? Close your eyes, reach into the bag, grab seven metaphysical systems at random and see what social orders you can build on the resulting mix. Philosophy has reduced the social order to a generations-spanning game of Scrabble. A dress-up Barbie doll philosophy for a Barbie doll society.

One of the things that impresses me most about reactionary thought is its remarkable coherence: everything fits together; more importantly, everything points upward. Every so often, a thought strikes me (I need to get better about writing them down so I can blog them later), a necessary connection suddenly realized, another piece in the puzzle fit into place. It is not even that one arbitrary arrangement has been proved to me to be optimal; it is that the idea that there could ever be any other arrangement has been proved to me to be irrational.

All this convinces me that if the world is ever to be saved, a revitalization and revalorization of ontology will have some part to play in it.

An intriguing-seeming movie popped up on Netflix, one I'd never heard of before: Black Death, a 2010 film starring Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne (Jack Builder from Pillars of the Earth). I was initially suspecting a bit of hokey trash along the lines of the awful Season of the Witch. What I got, instead, was a fascinating period piece, gritty and grim, of a medieval world in the throes of a pestilence-induced crisis of faith. No spoilers here, sorry to say, but suffice to say it resonates with our occasional discussions of atheism and religion.

I remember briefly obsessing about flag-burning once during my college years; I seem to recall a flag-burning Constitutional amendment came within a vote or two in the Senate of being sent to the states. I also remember vacillating wildly about the issue. I haven't given it much thought since then, mainly because no one else has, but now I see it's back in the news. What are we reactionaries to make of it? (Note that by flag desecration I mean any act directed toward a flag which is aimed at sullying it, such as burning it in protest, cutting or tearing it, trampling it, or smearing it with foul substances; the burning of a flag in accordance with protocols for its proper retirement are not of interest here).

First, let's orient the discussion toward its proper object. There is no sense complaining that such a ban would run afoul of anyone's rights. There is no natural right to do it that I can discern, and whether or not there ought to be a civil right to that effect is precisely what's at issue here. At best, one could make a case that banning flag desecration would run afoul of other people's natural rights. But that only gets us so far: justice itself entails the restriction of rights when the crime is of sufficient gravity to justify it. Thus the murderer loses his freedom of movement when he is imprisoned, while lesser crimes are punished with proportional restrictions or impositions; in other words, it doesn't go beyond "the means must be suited to the ends"; it says nothing about the character of the end. So the proper question ought to be, "Is the desecration of the flag a grave enough matter to justify legal enforcement of its prohibition?"

Probably so, although there's certainly room for debate about the extent or form of the prohibition. A flag is an existential representation of a group of people, an expression of their self-consciousness as a people and not merely a mass of alienated persons. In a sense, then, to desecrate the flag is to consciously attack the deliberate self-expression of a united people. Insofar as social unity is a good thing, and thus a thing to which people have a right, they also have a right to demand that the symbols through which this unity is expressed be protected, and thus a right to forbid the desecration of those symbols. There is a reason, after all, that it's called flag desecration -- that is, de-sacralization, or the removal of a thing's sacred character -- and not merely flag destruction.

To the modern, people's objection to the desecration of the national flag is incomprehensible: it's just a variegated bit of fabric, after all. But in registering this objection, he betrays nothing but the autistic insensibility of his soul to the importance of representations in organizing man's social life; he also exposes himself as a materialist (and, consequently, exposes the vacuity of the idea of "values" in a materialist ontology, despite his objection that it need not lead to nihilism). He may acknowledge the fact that flag-burners themselves don't feel as if they're just burning a colorful strip of cloth, but in doing so he will probably say that the flag is nothing more than a receptacle for the projections of collective consciousness. But in saying this, he has given the game away. The flag is an expression of the people's self-consciousness, and this is what endows it with value; that it would still serve this purpose even if the flag had a different shape, color, or content changes nothing. It's true that any given flag is an arbitrary design; but it's true only in the sense that any given man has made an arbitrary choice of wife -- it is not then follow that his wife doesn't matter or that he has no duties toward her. Haecceity matters.

Conversely, another commonly-heard objection is that the flag is, indeed, a symbol -- but a symbol of freedom. Thus, the logic goes, prohibiting the kind of freedom of expression that allows a flag to be burned would be an insult to the flag, not a protection of it. (This is the logic hinted at in Michael Douglas' final speech in The American President). But this is very little more than propositional nationalism, that is, the idea of America not as a nation but as some sort of nebulous ideal; we might also call it universalized nationalism. As such, it is runs afoul of the same absurdities as propositional nationalism does: it means that "American" corresponds not to national citizenship but to adherence to some ideal. We know this is false, though, or at least that no one takes it seriously, because there are plenty of Americans who don't believe in that ideal and plenty of non-Americans who do. Clearly, "American" is not an ideology but a nationality: it relates to identity, concrete, particular, and historical. To be American is not (necessarily or exclusively) to be a democrat or a libertarian or a capitalist but to be a citizen of the United States, subject to the authority of its government and sharing in a common culture, heritage, and network of traditions as those who also share this identity. A second response to this conflation of the flag-as-freedom is that it's obviously self-contradicting: if the flag is a symbol of freedom, why do protestors burn it and not some other symbol? Because they hate freedom? Why, then, do they insist on the freedom to burn the flag? Protestors themselves never think they're burning the flag as an expression of hatred for freedom but as an expression of hatred for the political expression of the people, that is, of this or that government (usually because of this or that action they disapprove of). In short, the modern can oppose a prohibition on flag desecration only by emptying both the flag and the act of burning it of symbolic content -- in other words, stripping both the object and the protest of meaning. (I suppose that is basically modernity in a nutshell: the intentional destruction of meaning for the sake of enthroning a subsequently meaningless freedom).

A final objection is that prohibiting flag desecration is unnecessary, either because it won't stop people from desecrating them or because it rarely ever happens. The latter is probably the best possible objection: that there are simply more pressing issues at hand. This may be true, but note that it is an argument related to the circumstances of the present time. It says nothing about whether or not such a law would be good in principle. As for the former objection, it is not necessary at all that the law actually suceed in stopping anyone from burning the flag: it is enough for it to serve as an expression of the common will, that this particular symbol has meaning and value and will be protected.

So the flag is a concrete symbol of a concrete people, an expression of themselves as a common people; and insofar as communal self-expression is a good, it follows that destruction of communal self-expression is an evil, and thus that the people are within their rights to demand that it not be permitted.

What form, then, should the prohibition take? Should flag desecration be a misdemeanor or a felony? Should it be punished with a fine (if so, how much?), imprisonment (if so, for how long?), or both? Should police seek to actively prevent, even with physical violence if necessary, the desecration of the flag, or should it only be punished after the fact? These are valid questions and require a good deal of reflection (especially on ethical first principles); they are certainly beyond the scope of this post, which is only intended to establish the validity in principle of the right of a people to insist that their national symbols be protected. I will say that the importance of protecting those symbols increases as national unity weakens, so that in times of crisis, it may well be more important to protect the flag in times of peace.

Bear in mind I say this as someone who has only a very generalized affection for his country -- there are a few nations in the world today quite as deserving of punishment and reprimand as this one.

One summer day in my very early youth, I witnessed a great storm. Over the course of an hour or two, this massive thunderhead formed, a deep, angry, stealy grayish-blue bordering on black. I remembered that it actually seemed to be swirling. In its center was an eye, a patch of luminescent, mossy green through which I could actually see the rain within. It was positively pregnant with rain. Little bolts of lightning, periodic bursts of illumination, shot throughout it, with a menacing rumble. Beholding it, I was thrilled and terrified, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, a kind of hysterical glee rising in my chest. When it broke, it rained so hard that it exhausted itself in minutes. I couldn't even see the street from the front of my house. Afterward, as the sun was setting, the color of everything was off: the sky a dull yellow, the streetlights burnt orange, the fireflies neon pink. The puddles of rainwater still left in the street reflected pink light, too. I couldn't have been much more than five or six at the time. And I know with certainty I have never been privileged with such an intense aesthetic experience in all the twenty years since.

All of this is to show that even as a child, I loved beauty for its own sake. I did not admire the storm or its aftermath because I was hoping it would give me candy or take me to the arcade; I simply rejoiced in the object of my love. Goodness, in other words, is its own reward.

The reverse, I think, is also true: evil is its own punishment.

And this means that it is probably imprecise, or at least unnecessary (because redundant), to say that Heaven is where good is rewarded and Hell is where evil is punished. Heaven is just where good is; Hell where evil is.

Let's think about this more carefully, though. In Christian theology, God is not merely good in the sense that we are good, i.e., evaluated with respect to some standard; God is goodness, i.e., He is the standard of goodness. Thus, good is its own reward because good has a name and a mind and a will and limitless creative power. So it may well be the case that Heaven contains other rewards, where God showers His beloved with material riches, prosperity, and comfort; but it is not necessary for it to be Heaven.

By contrast, in Christian theology, evil is imperfection, flaw, or defect. It has no objective ontological existence of its own. To give oneself over to evil, then, is simply to destroy oneself. This is telling because it illuminates Christ's analogizing Hell to a dump wherein garbage was burned: a place for broken and useless things. Hell, indeed, is where evil resides.

Here again, it is unnecessary for Hell to be painful in order to be Hell. But does that mean Hell isn't painful? Or that there's no possible way to reconcile God's goodness with the prospect of eternal torment? I think not. God's mercy is such that He does not permit His children to enter eternity under the delusion that evil is anything other than what it is, or that evil is capable of triumphing over good. He lets them go to the fate they've chosen for themselves, with the proviso that they understand it in the fullness of truth: that they have rebelled against good, and that evil cannot shield them from it. If pain, even the mere spiritual pain of having knowingly made a bad choice, results, so be it. (This is one of those points that I think is simply incomprehensible to the typical atheist: that pain is not an unmitigated evil but can be instructive, even instrumental -- and in this respect is actually good).

Scientific knowledge is knowledge of mechanism that enables prediction and control. If you treat that kind of knowledge as adequate to all reality, which scientism has to do to be workable, then human agency disappears.

Human agency is nonetheless with us. We know ourselves as agents, we recognize others as such (if we are not psychopaths), and intelligent activities like science seem to require it.

The solution people adopt is to accept human agency as a reality but a very strange sort of reality about which nothing can be said. To say something about it would be to assert knowledge regarding it and therefore to attempt to subject it to a regime of mechanism, prediction, and control. That’s why it’s horribly wrong (in the current view) to classify people or to attribute significant qualities to them. Any attempt to do so is an attempt to enslave them.

Instead, each of us becomes equally an unknowable being transcending all reality about whom nothing can be said and whose will has a validity to which no limits can be assigned. But then science stops being the supreme standard. PC becomes the supreme standard. Each of us becomes a god, absolute and unknowable. If that conflicts with science, so much the worse for science, and that is where we are today.

The moral: science is a wonderful thing, but it’s a specialized part of more general human practices of knowledge, and when it tries to be the whole you get big problems.

When you subscribe to any kind of metaphysical system based on error (i.e., the self-refutingly unscientific belief that science is the only way to know things), that's what you get: "big problems."

A system of thought can run aground in two respects. First, it can be simply self-contradicting, which is to say that it can't possibly true because it refutes itself. Scientism, I've argued before, is one example of this, but so too is what I've previously identified as deontological libertarianism -- in a nutshell, the belief that consent is morally prior to all other arrangements (whether or not you consent to the binding character of your consent). I'm sure you can think of other systems of thought that truck-bomb themselves right out of the gate (e.g., "all truths are relative"). If you can gather up all the loose ends, you might be able to tie them together into a single act of circular reasoning ("the right to property derives from the fact of self-ownership; the fact of self-ownership is legitimated by the right to own things"), but that doesn't resolve the problem of internal consistency.

. . . liberalism is at best highly inconsistent re: its attitude toward sex and more often than not treats it like it does everything else, within a paradigm of materialist reductionism: it’s “just sex.” Innately meaningless, valueless, a totally physical recreation with at best conventional (and thus arbitrary) significance attached to it. Yes, sex is regarded as an expression of the self, but so is everything: piercings, tattoos, desecrating the Eucharist, etc. And it regards it as no more innately valuable or meaningful than any of those things.

So to answer your last question, “Why the liberal hysteria over pedophilia?” you have to bear this in mind… that if sex is meaningless, than sexual crimes must also be meaningless. In other words, reflexive hysteria and the Voegelinian prohibition of questioning is their way of confronting the fact that a world filled with pedophiles is exactly what a world run consistently on their principles would look like.

(It's a credit, actually, to the basic decency of people that modernity has taken so long to get to where it is. The shucking of long-held moral convictions, even in the face of inability to articulate rational defenses of them, is difficult. One has to convince oneself. It's a testimony to what Christians have been saying all along -- that man has an intuitive and innate yearning for the good -- that modernity can only function because it's riven with unprincipled exceptions from its own logical conclusions. Yeah, the modern objection to pedophilia is basically irrational within the framework of its own principles; yeah, they can't explain why instinctive revulsion is OK with respect to pedophilia but not OK with respect to homosexuality [bearing in mind that "because they can't consent!" hasn't ever stopped us from making them eat vegetables, brush their teeth, or do their homework, or that people don't respond with horror to violations of legal technicalities]. But moderns are basically decent enough [for now] that they don't let their irrational dogma get in the way of the intuitive apprehension that buggering children is wrong, and not just because they're technically, legally incapable of consenting until they reach an arbitrarily-designated age.)

So unsound systems of thought produce big problems. But the system of thought characteristic of modernity -- basically ontological reductionism, the war against the order of being -- is a big thing, and it relates to the world in big ways. Its fingers extend not merely through the way we think about being but also the way we think about man, the universe, society, knowledge, and ethics. So the problems it produces aren't just big problems -- they're BIG big problems. As Kalb relates in his talk "PC: The Cultural Antichrist":

. . . political correctness is an odd tendency. It's a bit uncanny. It doesn't fit in with how we normally think about things. That's why we don't know what to make of it. People try to laugh it off, but it doesn't laugh off.

It seems too stupid to be real but it trumps everything all the same. If a thieving employee shoots and murders his co-workers the big question is whether any of them were racists. When an affirmative action army officer does the same, because he wants to do jihad, what top brass worry about is whether it will make diversity look bad.

Something that trumps normal considerations so completely must have transcendent importance. It's clear that PC relates to something big.

Ordinarily, egregious errors are self-correcting, if nothing else because their proponents follow them through quickly to obscene and heinous conclusions. What, then, has kept the modern train of errors running? Personal dishonesty and intentionally affected ignorance internally, intentional suppression (libeling, intimidation, and murder) of people who presume to point out the errors as errors externally. I think this latter point has historically been more important in fueling the compounding errors of modernity, precisely because it fuels the former; the ends seem to justify the means beforehand, but absolutely have to once the fires have started and the graveyards begin to fill.